The Return of a Magazine That Changed Culture

In the beginning, it was. Founded by the editor Nick Logan as a music magazine with an eye for style, it showcased David Bowie, John Lydon and Siouxsie Sioux among its first covers. Early contributors included Julie Burchill, Jon Savage and James Truman, who would go on to become the editorial director of Condé Nast.

With each issue, the magazine quickly broadened to track night life, youth culture, politics and fashion. “There was this view of The Face as a fashion magazine, but it wasn’t,” said Paul Gorman, the author of “The Story of The Face: The Magazine That Changed Culture.” “It was a general interest magazine.”

The Face offered something new. “All these things we now take for granted didn’t really exist,” said Princess Julia, a D.J. and artist who has been a linchpin of London counterculture since the 1970s. At the time, Julia was living in a London squat with friends like Stephen Jones, now the milliner for labels such as Dior and Marc Jacobs. “I mean, who’d heard of a stylist in 1981?”

Face readers were obsessive. I was one of them, living in a small village 100 miles north of London. I bought my first issue, April 1986, at age 12. The magazine taught me how to read with discernment. It was personal: None of my friends cared. All that mattered to me was that, each month, I soaked up its information and let it push my own thinking about what was possible.

Its readers were not just in Britain. “I was going to the mall to buy a 12-inch,” said Honey Dijon, a D.J. and producer who grew up in Chicago. She was a teenager in the 1980s. “They had these magazines on the countertop at JR’s Music. I freaked out because I’d never seen a man in a skirt on a magazine before.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/style/the-face-magazine.html?partner=rss&emc=rss